


Six for the Truth

by historymiss



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/M, Pacific Rim AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:02:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24487909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: We return to the world of Pacific Rim for Get Hect'd week with a prequel- just what the heck were Palamedes and Camilla doing on Ninth Base anyway? What's the deal with Harrow's aunts? And how many gross things can Dr Dulcinea touch?
Relationships: Camilla Hect/Palamedes Sextus
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [One Flesh, One End](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21079649) by [historymiss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss). 



The Ninth Base reveals itself to them slowly. It rises from storm-churned waters much like a broken bone poking through flesh, or perhaps something else equally unwelcome. It’s big, and black, and very ugly. Rust stains the shutters of the hangar, causing it to screech as it opens to admit the helicopter dropping off two of the PPDC’s finest investigators.

“Yikes.” says Camilla Hect, raking her fingers through her hair and shaking off excess water in a sudden shower of raindrops. “What a dump.”

Palamedes Sextus’ only reply is to squint, grimly, through rain-spattered glasses and vulture his way over to the elevator like a man with his shoulders glued to his earlobes. Camilla picks up the bags and, as always, as she is meant to, follows.

\----

They’re met at the elevator by Harrowhark Nonagesiumus, heir to the Ninth and one of four certified jaeger pilots currently serving Ninth Base. The files sent to them before the mission cover all this, as well as the fact that she is, at seventeen years old, one of the youngest rangers in PPDC history. 

What they don’t cover is that Harrowhark is approximately five feet three inches of spite and caffeine pills dressed up like a haunted victorian child. One of the really annoying ones that died of consumption.

“Sextus.” Her voice is just barely louder than the rain still hammering on the hangar’s roof. There’s a ragged edge to it, under the precise, slightly plummy vowels that speak of prestige gone to rot. “Hect.”

Her family had been powerful, once. Until monsters crawled out from under the sea and tried to eat them all.

“Ranger Nonagesimus.” Palamedes smiles with the professorial affability that, combined with the angular planes of a face unaccustomed to sunlight, allows him to pass for a much older man. “I didn’t realise we rated a military escort.”

Camilla rolls her eyes. All three of them are, in fact, military - it’s just that Palamedes is the kind that wears glasses and labcoats and shouts things like ‘inconceivable!’, and Camilla is the kind that does that sort of thing plus visit the gym.

“A PPDC internal investigation is a serious matter.” Harrow appears to give all her attention to massaging her wrist, flexing her fingers like claws in the fitful light of the elevator. “My aunts requested I be the one to take you to your rooms and supply you with the information you need.”

“Making sure we don’t get usefully lost on the way there?” Camilla adjusts her stance slightly as the elevator grinds to a shuddering halt.   
Harrow stares at her levelly, eyes black and bottomless as the sea.

“There is nobody else.”

\-------------

All the Ninth base can spare for them is a single room apparently bolted together out of decaying sheet metal, two beds pushed awkwardly into opposite corners like they’ve had a fight. Harrowhark doesn’t apologise, and Palamedes and Camilla don’t bother telling her that they prefer to share a room anyway. 

Once the heir of the Ninth has slunk off back to skitter around in the shadows or whatever she does in her free time, Camilla sinks down on the leftmost bed to close her eyes and let out a long, low whistle. 

Palamedes lifts his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose.

“My thoughts precisely. Trauma, yes?”

“Deep rooted.Did you see the-”

“Circuit burns?” He winces. “She must have got them when her first partner died. Nigenad, wasn’t it?”

Camilla nods. “Mortus Nigenad, then Glaurica. I think they’re all-” she waves a hand. “It’s a tight community.”

It wasn’t uncommon, out on the bases. Especially these remote ones, and you couldn’t get further out of the way than the Ninth. Palamedes doesn’t sit, because he is constitutionally incapable of staying still while thinking, but he does stretch out far enough that the tips of his fingers graze the corroded ceiling.

“Something’s fucked here, Cam.”

“Warden,” Camilla exhales, as he crosses the room and she feels his presence, reassuring, constant, safe- “I completely agree.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pyjamas- olive branches- terrible working environments- a mad science convention

It doesn’t take long for them to unpack. They only have one bag between them, Camilla’s sensible underwear resting alongside Palamdes’ favourite worn, stripy pyjama set. The side pockets hold an unusual amount of knives. The bottom layer is almost entirely notebooks. 

It’s very _them_.

“First port of call still the K-science division?” Camilla doesn’t need to ask this, not really- they’re of one mind on almost everything, at least when they’re both on an investigation, but she likes to ask questions and hear the dry rasp of Palamedes’ voice as he answers them.

“I think that would be best.” Of course, being of one mind on things also means that Camilla has a better idea of Palamedes’ motivations than he himself does. She shuffles through their balled-up collection of socks and runs her thumb over the darned patch on a heel, either caused by her own calluses or the weird bony geometry of Palamedes’ ankles.

“She might be too busy.”

A very, very brief silence. Palamedes exhales, just a little, and Camilla only catches it because she knows every rhythm and hitch of his breath. 

“Then we can interview her assistant.” The change of focus is something like an apology, or an acknowledgement. Camilla accepts it for the olive branch she knows it to be.

She is very, very tired of olive branches.

\------------

The Ninth’s K-science lab is sunk deep into the spur of rock that forms the foundations of the base: an echoing, chilly hole that smells of damp and formaldehyde. Tanks full of greenish-yellow liquid line the walls, and somewhere up above them a fan sputters fitfully as it tries to circulate the air.

Camilla, once again, wrinkles her nose. It may settle into a permanent state of wrinkle, the way things are going. 

“Didn’t you say Dr. Septimus had a lung condition?”

“I did.” Palamedes peers around the kaiju samples. “Maybe this is a temporary working situation?”

“It isn’t!” A cheerful voice greets them both from around the corner. They turn past a glass cylinder filled with what appear to be eyeballs to see a consumptively beautiful young woman in a clear plastic labcoat elbow deep in… something blue.   
She waves. 

There is an extremely strong smell, redolent of public toilets at some kind of underwater festival.

Palamedes gags politely. Camilla, who has decided that she isn’t going to be petty (at least not in the conventional way), bites on her tongue. Hard.

“Sextus and Hect!” Dr Septimus grins, wobbling slightly as she peels off her rubber gloves and eases back into her crutches. “Hect and Sextus!” Her eyes, as she approaches them, are very pale green, like well sucked boiled sweets. “You naughty boy, you should have told me you were arriving today.”

“PPDC security.” Palamedes shrugs, a complicated movement that looks like an umbrella having a fit. “They always have to keep everyone on their toes.”

“Easier for some than others.” Dulcinea gives Palamedes another smile, no less dazzling for the thinness of her face or her cracked and flaking lips. “Sit with me?”

Palamedes looks back to Camilla, who moves her shoulders imperceptibly. 

“For a moment, yes.”

They follow Dulcinea past her dissection table (‘Just a little extracurricular project for a friend in Hong Kong’) to a drier corner of the lab outfitted with two honest to goodness settees. They’re slightly mouldy, and stained with bright yellow fluid, but Dulcinea lowers herself into one like it’s a throne.

Palamedes and Camilla perch on the other one, and though it’s just big enough that their knees don’t have to touch, they do anyway.

“Now,” Dulcinea leans forward, her eyes aglow, though if it’s excitement or fever is anyone’s guess. “Are you here about the murders?”

Palamedes coughs violently. Camilla, by contrast, just rolls her eyes to look at the ceiling. The problem with being the smartest person in the room most of the time is that just occasionally, you can step into a different room.

“Yes.”

The smile on Dulcinea’s face turns into something sharper, as frail and hard edged as glass.

“Fascinating.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dulcinea's tea parties suck- ageism in action- another dramatic conversation in a hallway

“I think-” Palamedes clears his throat, a raspy echo that seems for a moment to fill the damp air, “Murder is rather a strong word when we haven’t gotten all of our data together, isn’t it?”

Dulcinea waves a hand airily, settling further back into her seat. As if summoned, Protosileaus looms out from the dripping darkness bearing a surgical tray with three chipped mugs of tea balanced on it.

“It’s shorter than ‘extremely suspicious chain of very similar deaths’, and I have to be smart about my lung capacity.”

Somehow, the last phrase sounds like an innuendo. Dulcinea certainly pitches it that way, winking broadly at Palamedes. Camilla finds herself grinding her teeth, and moves he rhand to rest, very slightly, against the plain weave of Palamedes’ pants leg.

She is more gratified than she likes to admit when he shifts towards her touch.

“I didn’t know you were so concerned about the Commanders, or Ranger Nigenad.” Camilla uses the military rank partly out of respect, and mainly because Ninth Base names are _utterly stupid_.

“Oh, I’m not.” Dulcinea says brightly, accepting her mug (‘CITY CRUSHIN’ CUTIE’, and a cartoon kaiju- very distasteful, in Camilla’s opinion) and blowing on it delicately, as if at a tea party. “It’s the kids that I’m interested in.”

Camilla frowns and looks over to find Palamedes mirroring her expression.

“There aren’t-”

“Any children on Ninth Base?” Dulcinea sips at her tea. “Of course not, this is a military installation. Well, except for young Harrowhark. And that strapping young engineer. Everyone else, with the exception of ourselves and Pro here, tend to the opposite end of the scale.”

She looks at them both over the rim of her mug.

“Funny, that.”

\-------------

“She’s got a point.” 

The walk back to their room is long, which means that Camilla has a lot of time to put forth her argument. This is good, because though she and Palamedes are not so much drift compatible as in a constant state of shared headspace, sometimes he really doesn’t want to listen to her.

“It’s just speculation.” Palamedes hunches his shoulders again, as if three inches of bone and not much else can block her out. “Priamhark and Pelleamena’s deaths weren’t even that suspicious until Mortus burned out on a routine exercise- and what does that even have to do with the average age of the base? You know that the problem has to be-”

“The Pons, yes.” Camilla jogs around to face him, tilting her head up so she can meet his eyes. “That’s why they sent us and not someone like Silas and his poor uncle. But you _know_ the average age of the base is weird. We reviewed the personnel records and there’s no way it should skew that high.”

“It just feels-” Palamedes huffs and pulls himself in, his steps stuttering to a halt so that he almost walks into a Camilla. “We’re jumping to conclusions.”

The hallway from the elevator is dark. Camilla has to fumble a moment before she can find Palamedes’ hand and ease it from its death grip on his arm. Her fingers lace around his, calluses scraping over bony knuckles. 

“It’s sweet of you to look for another way.”

The skin under her fingers heats. “I don’t want to put you in an uncomfortable position.”

He’s so _formal_ when he’s embarrassed. Camilla would laugh, if it wasn’t so damn heartbreaking.

She presses their hands, entwined, to his chest.

“I trust you.”

It doesn’t need saying. But she likes to fill the air with the sound of it, anyway.

Palamedes lifts their hands to kiss their entwined fingers. She knows he means the gesture, even if his heart has been divided ever since he and Dulcinea first exchanged letters.

He’s good about it. And honest about it. And Camilla knows that as much as he loves Dulcinea- a distant, academic love, flirting but never physical- he loves her, too.

Palamedes shuts his eyes and takes a deep, long breath.

There is nothing more that needs to be said after that.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The plot thickens- Elderly Aunts make an appearance, kind of- Ninth Base is gross, part eleventy

They double check the personnel files first, which takes them to LOCCENT. It’s understaffed and outdated, blocky beige computers ranked in front of a screen that has black mildew creeping around the edges.

Commander Lachrimorta passes them on the way in. The woman is tiny, hunched inside her Ranger uniform like a goblin pretending at being a human being. Like her sister, Aisamorta, she is blind. It doesn’t seem to cause them any problems in their jaeger.

It feels very unscientific to call her ‘spooky’, but Palamedes and Camilla mouth it at each other after she’s gone anyway.

The personnel records haven’t changed since they last looked at them, and Dulcinea is, of course, correct- there is nobody under thirty in the whole base except for Harrowhark and Gideon Nav (her ‘strapping young engineer’). No new blood, either, until the transfer of Protosileaus and Dulcinea to the K-Science lab two years ago.

Biting her lower lip, Camilla scrolls the records back. Palamedes leans in alongside her, their shoulders touching as they squint at the same screen. The records flicker, years unspooling back until-

“There.” Palamedes stabs a skinny finger at the screen. It records, impossibly, a birth. Locusta Nio. “What is-”

“Look.” Camilla scrolls back another year. More. Babies, children even- a whole creche of them. She keys the page forward, and they’re gone. “An epidemic? Maybe they were taking orphans, and one of them brought something in. It’s happened before.”

Frowning, Palamedes pushes his glasses up to rub the bridge of his nose. “WE would have received requests for aid if that was the case. This must be something else. What was the year?”

“Right before the old Commanders died.” Camilla mirrors Palamedes’ frown. “There’s no parents listed for any of these children. One or two at least should be base babies, but these all look like they just materialised from the ether.”

They look at each other, gray eyes to brown, and Palamedes works it out a little before Camilla does. She doesn’t resent him for it. That’s what he’s for.

“Go and try to raise the PPDC.” He rests a hand on Camilla’s shoulder as he stands up. Not for balance, really, but because her shoulder is there and she is as steady, for him, as the rock that Ninth Base stands on.   
“I’m going back down to the K-Science lab.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Final revelations- Parenting, or, how not to do it- being alone

Loping back down to the K-science lab, Palamedes runs the calculations under his breath. Math isn’t exactly his key area- he knows enough to not embarrass himself, which is still more than most- but logic _is_ , and the numbers, as horrible as they are, are the framework around which this whole terrible theory is built.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, youngest pilot in generations, is seventeen years old. One of two children remaining from a creche of hundreds of orphans. 

Was she really theirs? Palamedes wonders, as he rounds the corner into the lab- silent, now, and dark. Dulcinea must be in a meeting, or perhaps sitting on a rock somewhere combing her hair and luring sailors to their deaths. 

No, don’t be stupid. Her lungs wouldn’t survive the damp.

Shoulders set in one broad, bony line, Palamedes runs his hands along the wall, fingers splayed like spiders as he searches, as much by touch as by sight. There must be something here. Some evidence of what was done.

It doesn’t take long until he finds the locker.

The discarded Pons.

It is so small. That’s what he will remember, in the daze as he walks up to their room to find Camilla, the bundle of wires dangling from his hand.

It would have had to be.

\---------

When he walks through the door, Camilla is kneeling in front of their comms system, turning the dial with a calm patience that Palamedes only knows is a front because of the way her neck muscles tighten as the static loops and squawks around her.

“-DC. This is Hect. Contact thirty-one six four. Respond, respond, respond.”

Nothing but the hiss of empty air. 

Palamedes kneels beside her, hands over the Pons. Camilla looks at it, then at him, and closes her eyes.  
Just briefly. Just for a moment.

It’s all the mourning those children will ever have.

“They tried to share the load.” It’s important to say it aloud. Palamedes’ voice is remarkably even, though he’s staring a hole through the radio. “They must have been working from early postulations from the original Lightcap breakthrough, the ones the ethics committee would never-”

He stops himself, takes off his glasses. The arm flexes and bends in his grip.

“Keep trying to raise them.”

“You won’t be able to.”

Both of them look around. Harrow is standing in the doorway, framed against the rusted metal like a saint’s icon, pale and shrunken in her fatigues and very, very tired.

“The whole base’s comms have died.”

Palamedes is on his feet half a second before Camilla. It’s the only circumstances, really, in which he’s faster than her. When there’s a truth to be told.

“Ranger Nonagesimus. I have some news you may not want to hear, but it’s important. Your parents constructed a secret experimental program to-”

_”Shut up.”_

For once, Harrow can’t look at him. Palamedes finds himself shaken by how strange it is to have a conversation with her and not be fixed with two void-black pinpricks determined to bore their way into his soul and force it into submission.

It’s then that he realises how cruel Priamhark and Pelleamena had been.

Harrow isn’t surprised. She’s _furious_.

“You don’t know-”

“I don’t know the whole story, no.” Though it cuts across hers, his tone is dry and gentle, impersonal as a doctor’s touch. “I don’t know the why, and parts of the how remain, frankly, a blessed mystery. But I can guess at enough of what they did to know that you should have never, ever been placed anywhere near a jaeger.”

At this, Harrow finally meets his gaze and Palamedes feels a jolt of anger so strong he sits back and Camilla takes half a step forward.

“Then you really don’t know anything at all.” Her voice chokes, as if the black tendrils burned on her throat are strangling her. “I am all that they have, Sextus. God help me, I am the last remaining pilot of the Tomb and the only one with enough training to guide the others.” Harrow’s hands clench, the nails, with their chipped black polish, bitten down to the quick. 

“I did not come here for sympathy, Sextus, Hect. I came here for your…. Help.”

“That can be the same thing.” Camilla murmurs, and Palamedes shoots a look at her over his shoulder. She shrugs. Camilla has been over Ninth drama for a while.

“You haven’t been able to get PPDC on the line, have you?”

They exchange glances, then shake their heads.

“It’s as if the outside world is gone.”

Harrow extends a hand. Out of the armour, her fingers are as pale as Palamedes’ the nails bitten down to the quick.

“I know that the Ninth has sins enough to drag us into the ocean. You can convict us for them when this is over.”

It’s killing her to offer this, and that, more than the simple mathematics of survival, is why Palamedes takes her hand.

That, and the fact that Harrow is alone.

Neither Palamedes nor Camilla have ever known what that’s like.


End file.
